If we could pay ants in sugar to stay out of our houses, we might do that instead of putting up poison ant baits. Or we could do things like let them clean up spilled food for us, if we weren’t worried about the ants being unhygenic. The biggest difficulty in trading with ants is that getting ants to understand and actually do what we would want them to do is usually more trouble than it’s worth when it’s even possible at all.
Humans do something with honeybees that’s a lot like trading, although it is mostly taking advantage of the fact that the effects of their natural behaviors (producing honey and pollinating plants) are useful to us. We still only tend to care about honeybee well-being to the extent that it’s instrumentally useful to us, though.
Yeah, a closer analogy to human-animal trade would be our two “symbiotic” species: dogs and cats. Humans have relied on guard dogs, hunting dogs, herding dogs and retrievers for a long time. In exchange we provide food, shelter, sometimes medicine, etc. From a wolf’s perspective, humans are not the worst pack members, because they have strange and useful abilities wolves lack. The deal with cats is probably simpler: Humans get pest control, cats get abundant mice, and the humans might be willing to throw in supplemental food when mice are scarce.
A few other domestic animals, including horses and sheep, could be argued to be “trading” with humans on some level. But you don’t have to look far to find animals where our relationship is more clearly exploitation or predation, or outright elimination.
This actually mirrors the range of outcomes I would expect from building a true superintelligence:
If we’re insanely lucky, we’ll be offered the deal dogs got offered: We won’t get to make any of the important decisions about our futures, or even understand what’s going on. We might get spayed or “put to sleep.” But maybe someone will occasionally throw a stick for us to chase.
But there’s a large chance we’ll be offered the same deal as passenger pigeons or smallpox: extinction.
Personally, this is why I favor a halt in the near future: When (1) is my most optimistic scenario, I don’t think it’s worth gambling. “Alignment”, to me, is basically, “Trying to build initially kinder pet owners,” with zero long term control.
If we could pay ants in sugar to stay out of our houses, we might do that instead of putting up poison ant baits. Or we could do things like let them clean up spilled food for us, if we weren’t worried about the ants being unhygenic. The biggest difficulty in trading with ants is that getting ants to understand and actually do what we would want them to do is usually more trouble than it’s worth when it’s even possible at all.
Humans do something with honeybees that’s a lot like trading, although it is mostly taking advantage of the fact that the effects of their natural behaviors (producing honey and pollinating plants) are useful to us. We still only tend to care about honeybee well-being to the extent that it’s instrumentally useful to us, though.
Yeah, a closer analogy to human-animal trade would be our two “symbiotic” species: dogs and cats. Humans have relied on guard dogs, hunting dogs, herding dogs and retrievers for a long time. In exchange we provide food, shelter, sometimes medicine, etc. From a wolf’s perspective, humans are not the worst pack members, because they have strange and useful abilities wolves lack. The deal with cats is probably simpler: Humans get pest control, cats get abundant mice, and the humans might be willing to throw in supplemental food when mice are scarce.
A few other domestic animals, including horses and sheep, could be argued to be “trading” with humans on some level. But you don’t have to look far to find animals where our relationship is more clearly exploitation or predation, or outright elimination.
This actually mirrors the range of outcomes I would expect from building a true superintelligence:
If we’re insanely lucky, we’ll be offered the deal dogs got offered: We won’t get to make any of the important decisions about our futures, or even understand what’s going on. We might get spayed or “put to sleep.” But maybe someone will occasionally throw a stick for us to chase.
But there’s a large chance we’ll be offered the same deal as passenger pigeons or smallpox: extinction.
Personally, this is why I favor a halt in the near future: When (1) is my most optimistic scenario, I don’t think it’s worth gambling. “Alignment”, to me, is basically, “Trying to build initially kinder pet owners,” with zero long term control.
Agreed. We don’t trade with ants because we can’t. If we could, there are lots of mutually profitable trades we could make.